Learning from Holiday Visitation Complications
Holiday visitation can be confusing. Let’s talk about it. I’m Tulsa family law attorney Carl Birkhead with Wirth Law Office in Oklahoma. I’ve been doing family and criminal law for about seven years now, and I want to help make law easy by talking a little bit about holiday visitation and how that interacts with a regular visitation schedule.
So if you are in a situation where you’re maybe in the early stages of a custody case or maybe you and your co-parent don’t have a formal custody or visitation order, you have questions about it, I want to explain a little bit about how these schedules work and how they kind of interplay with regular visitation. Anyone who has a custody order already in place should be able to look at their order and see, usually in big bold letters, holiday visitation supersedes regular visitation.
How Holiday Visitation Supersedes Regular Visitation
What does that mean? For example, let’s say Christmas is on a weekend and it’s supposed to be dad’s weekend to have the child during regular visitation, but it’s supposed to be mom’s time to have Christmas. Mom wins. Mom’s holiday visitation trumps that.
Or let’s say because usually the holiday breaks will get broken up, one parent gets one half of the break, the other parent gets the other half of the break. In those instances, the regular weekend visitation gets suspended and the holiday visitation takes over. It supersedes whatever the regular weekend visitation is.
Resuming Regular Visitation After Holidays
After the holiday ends, getting back into the regular visitation, different parents and different court orders handle it differently. Some parents will just do, well, we’ll just start weekend visitation up right where we left off. Or some parents will look at a calendar and say, well, if we had been doing the week every other weekend, then this would have been my weekend, this would have been your weekend.
Unless there’s specific language in the court order dictating when and how to resume regular visitation, what I always encourage my clients to do is just try to do what works best for their schedules and what works best for the child. Ultimately, it all comes down to trying to do what is best for the child and making sure that the child gets an equal amount of time with both parents.
Need Help With Your Visitation Schedule?
If you have questions about it, if you have concerns, if you’ve got a holiday visitation schedule that you don’t think works, or that you want to get reworked, absolutely give us a call. I’m Tulsa family lawyer Carl Birkhead of Wirth Law Office, and I want to help make law easy. Call us today at 918-879-1681 to schedule a low-cost initial strategy session. Let us help you find the best solution for your family’s needs.
